Perhaps it is because their baseball caps are all too tight, but the police have this delusion that this debate is all about them, their numbers and conditions.

It is not. It is about the people they have failed.

I will cite some well-known examples, which cannot be blamed on the mild spending cuts which have slightly reduced police numbers from their historic peak around ten years ago.

The first is that of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Frankie, who had severe learning difficulties and became a target for a gang of louts in their Leicestershire village.

Horribly, Fiona and Frankie were not safe in their own home, where they endured jeering sieges in which their house was pelted with eggs and flour.

Their neighbours, understandably terrified that these feral persecutors would turn on them, knew all too well that law and authority were far away, and stayed out of it.

Fiona and her daughter endured this hell on earth for ten years, during which they appealed at least 27 times for police help. None came.

So one day Fiona sank into a despair so complete that she went out and burned herself and her daughter to death in their small car.

Then there was Garry Newlove, who foolishly assumed that this was still an orderly, peaceful country. He challenged a group of youths outside his Warrington house.

He thought one of them had vandalised his wife’s car. The youths promptly kicked him to death, laughing as they did so.

More recently there was Richard Osborn-Brooks, who was immediately arrested after he killed one of two burglars while defending his home and his wife from a late-night break-in.

The police eventually let him go, but it is their rotten instincts I am interested in.

Several things emerge from these cases.

One is that the police are very bad at responding to appeals for help from the weak.

The second is that their growing absence from the streets has made wrongdoers confident and also made the law-abiding fearful.

There simply should not be gangs of louts hanging around anywhere in the streets of a country with 120,000 police officers.

The third is that the police are increasingly neutral between the criminal and his victim.

Marinated for years in a sauce of Left-wing rubbish about crime being caused by poverty and suffering, not to mention the other rubbish about hate crimes, they simply do not – as we would do – side with the man who has had his home violated and tried to defend it.

They treat such a man as if he were a criminal. We know about their reluctance to investigate burglaries, not surprising when this crime is now out of control.

But even worse is their fashionable, inexcusable, lazy and stupid decision to ignore the law against marijuana possession.

I suspect that a very high proportion of the violence they then struggle to deal with is committed by young men who have destroyed their mental health by smoking marijuana.

If the drug laws were properly enforced, there would be far less violence.

Any minute now some police apologist will tell me that I don’t sympathise with them enough, and should go on what is laughingly called a ‘patrol’ with them.

Look, I have been on such patrols. That is exactly why I know they are useless.

What the police do is to wait for crime to happen, and then rush noisily to the scene.

I will say it again and again until it sinks in. A police officer is very little use after a crime has been committed.

He cannot unburgle you, unmug or unstab you. That is why I am completely unimpressed by the National Police Chiefs Council boss Sara Thornton trying to curry favour with the public by saying it is better to investigate burglaries than hate crimes.

A burglary is a horror and a misery which can ruin a person’s life. Investigation won’t make that better.

What we want is to see burglaries and disorder prevented by proper, regular police foot patrols, which worked just fine until the liberals abolished them.

When New Labour came into power in 1997, MI5’s huge files on Left-wing subversion were destroyed, a decision which greatly suited the many covert ex-Marxists in the Blair hierarchy.

This was quickly followed by a politically correct inquisition which transformed the Security Service into a nest of fashionable liberalism.

It was supposed to concentrate on way-out Islamists. But now we learn that it is to ‘take the lead in combating Right-wing terrorism’.

‘What is that?’ you may well ask.

The killer of Jo Cox MP, conveniently identified by the authorities as an extremist, was plainly mentally ill and had no serious politics.

And Britain’s various white supremacist hooligans, while nasty, are not really a threat to the state.

But I reckon these minor, isolated cases will form the excuse for surveillance, and perhaps worse, of anyone more conservative than the Tory Party.

It gives me the shivers.

The Blairite spite that reduced our Queen to tears

A new biography of Prince Charles notes his justified grief at the foolish decision to lay up the Royal Yacht Britannia, and not to replace her.

Like anyone, he can make a reasoned case for that lovely ship’s huge pulling power, and the way she could be used to enhance our political influence and commercial success.

But the Blairites were not being rational when they did this. They were unable openly to attack the monarchy, though deep down they have despised it for years.

They were making a spiteful, deliberate and highly emotive signal to the cultural revolutionaries whose cause they served.

At a key speech to Labour activists in Stevenage on the eve of his 1997 victory, barely reported, the Blair creature got the loudest cheer of the night by attacking the supposed expense of a new yacht, small change compared with the giant spending debauch he was even then planning.

They retired Britannia because, in the end, they hope to get rid of the Crown, which they rightly see as an obstacle to their plans for a politically correct Utopia.

*******

And still the emotive campaign for ‘medical marijuana’ continues, quietly backed by people whose real motive is to legalise the drug for commercial sale and general use. Any real expert will tell you that the evidence of its effectiveness is very thin. And I confidently predict that, if the legalisers win, you will never hear another peep about it.

&&&&&&&&

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16 May 2018 4:28 PM

I suspect I wouldn’t much like Mick Herron, author of the increasingly acclaimed ‘Slow Horses’ series of thrillers. There’s an undercurrent of boring, self-satisfied conventional leftism in his work, which most of his readers probably don’t notice because they are like that too. It’s a pity, because in many ways the books are very good. The later books of ‘John le Carre’, where he develops a tedious anti-Thatcherite and anti-American tone, would likewise be better without this self-indulgence. Is Mr Herron’s political stance (if I have read it correctly) important? We’ll see.

My complaint isn’t, by the way, made because of his persistent use of a fictional Tory politician, with certain close resemblances to a well-known national figure of our times, as a sort of villain with secrets to hide. I’m interested that he gets away with this, but any fiction set in modern times and using real people as background is quite likely to resort to this sort of thing.

Though my complaint is connected. It’s more because one of his early characters, by no means an admirable one, bears a faint resemblance to me – a right-wing newspaper columnist who tends to blame the late Roy Jenkins for many of the country’s present ills.

Of course, this person turns out to be a secret Nazi, who has been ruined by the exposure of this fact, but we all know (don’t we?) that this is what people like me are: secret Nazis.

Later on in the series there’s an anti-EU politician, who slightly resembles a real person, married to a strident female columnist who closely resembles a real person. Both of them, likewise, turn out to be profoundly flawed in the sort of ways left-wing persons like to imagine such people are flawed.

One of the other reasons why I mention this is because none of the reviews of Mr Herron’s books seem to have picked up on this. Who is he? I’ve no idea, though we know that he lives in Oxford, my home town, and was for many years a ‘legal sub--editor’, which sounds pretty unexciting –either very good cover or very dull. Not like ‘Le Carre’ (aka David Cornwell) who is believably supposed to have done stints in both the Security Service (‘MI5’) and the Secret Intelligence Service (‘MI6’) .

Having read all Mr Herron’s published books in the ‘Slow Horses’ series( he has written others which I haven’t read) I have two comparisons to make. They are partial comparisons. There is a touch of Raymond Chandler, because so much of the plots don’t really matter at all, or even make very much sense. Does anyone really know what happens in ‘The Big Sleep?’ ‘The High Window’ or ‘Farewell My Lovely’? I have read them all at least five times and don’t really know, or have forgotten. What I remember is the nightclubs, the cars, the women, the hungover awakenings, with mild hallucinations, the hothouse and the Brasher doubloon, but above all the dialogue and the wit. The fun is all in the writing, the style, the description and the events. Of course he is much ruder and cruder than Chandler, and also ruder and cruder than P.G.Wodehouse. Wodehouse has people ‘recoiling like a salted snail’. Herron’s rather revolting central character is described as, among other things ‘a misplaced squid’ and ‘a post-coital warthog’.

The preposterous idea at the heart of these books is that MI5, which Herron wrongly describes from time to time as the ‘Secret Service’, has a grim outstation staffed by failures, incompetents and loose cannons (‘Slow Horses’) who have been exiled forever from his fictional Security Service’s fictional smart headquarters at Regent’s Park. They can never go back there. They must remain forever in this place of exile.

In this miserable, shabby building, jeeringly known as ‘Slough House’ though this isn’t its name, they are given wretched make-work tasks, to drive them mad or persuade them to resign. Their individual failings – drug abuse, gambling, wild ultra-violence, delusions of grandeur, are lovingly enumerated. Only one of them is there unjustly but this too is deemed to have been his fault. If he had been any good, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be stitched up. In charge of this failure factory is the grotesque, obese, flatulent chain-smoker, boozer and consumer of horrible food Jackson Lamb, who presumably has this post because he knows too much about his senior colleagues to be fired, but also cannot be allowed back into the Regent’s Park headquarters.

Lamb is a monster, rude, cruel, overbearing, squalid and, one has to imagine, very smelly indeed. It is not clear if he has a home to go to. If he does, it must be a hideous, sordid lair. Herron appears to view smoking as a sort of sign of virtue and protest against the shiny ethics of political correctness, which he affects to despise but doesn’t, I think, really disagree with in any deep way. If Jackson Lamb really existed, he would either be dead from a combined attack of lung cancer, heart failure, emphysema and obesity, or drooling in a care home. Yet despite his incessant cigarettes, bottles of whisky and appalling takeaway feasts, he can still overpower and outfight far younger, fitter men. He can also out-think them. This is because of his heroic past as an agent in the field in the Cold War, though quite what MI5 was doing in Berlin on the Cold War I’m not sure. I am endlessly irritated by the way in which MI5 is described as a spy service, and its bosses are described as spy chiefs. This is not what they do.

But there, why complain about lack of authenticity in what is, in the end, a fantasy? There are some (often very well described) outrages of the kind MI5 is always claiming to prevent. But what follows is more or less absurd, as the useless ‘Slow Horses’ find themselves somehow drawn into schemes and counter-plots which the mainstream Security Service does not, cannot or will not address.

I might as well moan about how Philip Marlowe doesn’t have his own fingerprint kit, or try to dissect Jeeves’s little miracles, in which he once again saves Bertie Wooster from himself, Roderick Spode or one member or another of the Glossop family.

It doesn’t matter. Because the writing is often very funny, even if it resorts to crudity and F-bombs more often than it really needs to, and the plots have the power to pull you along and keep you reading, a rare talent.

That’s why these books worry me. Because while they grip and entertain, they also seem to me to embody and accept the questionable idea that some sort of secret security service really does keep us safe, a claim I think at best unproven. And they blithely posit (and seem to excuse if not applaud) the supposed existence of cellars deep beneath the fictional Regent’s Park headquarters where something which looks and sounds a lot like torture takes place. And it’s sort of funny. Which it isn’t. And then there’s that Nazi columnist. This is how ideas take root.

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14 May 2018 4:41 PM

I thought it was time to write a small article in defence of ‘Whataboutery’, also known as ‘Whataboutism’ or ‘Tu Quoque’ (Thou also [dost this thing]’)

I am surprised by how easily some people are persuaded that a point is wrong when it is dismissed as ‘Whataboutism’. Why, when the person making the case is claiming a moral fault, is it not legitimate to point out that he himself has the same fault?

The Bible is pretty clear on this.

IN The Gospel according to St Matthew Chapter 7, vv 3-5, Our Lord says : ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ‘Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.’

The same metaphor appears in almost identical words in the Gospel according to St Luke, vv 41-2 . It seems odd, when moralising in a society whose morals are supposed to be Christian (indeed, on what other basis can we approve or disapprove of any action?), to classify the preaching of Jesus Christ as either a fallacy or as ‘whataboutery’.

The term ‘whataboutism’ seems to have first appeared in the Cold War, when the USSR might point to the American treatment of the black minority there, when attacked for being a police state with labour camps.

But this was feeble. The two things are not the same. Certainly the USA is very far from being a perfect society, and its treatment of African-Americans has been ( and to some extent remains) highly unsatisfactory.

But this simply wasn’t comparable with the USSR’s system of censorship, repression and political trials. What’s more, anyone who knows anything about Russia knows that ethnic bigotry is very common in Russia, generally directed against the nearest available targets, Central Asians, Chechens and peoples from beyond the Caucasus, but liberally applied to anyone with a dark skin from any part of the planet.

The Soviet propaganda was more effective when it responded to complaints of Soviet repression in the satellite states of eastern Europe by noting that the USA did not readily tolerate governments hostile to it in Latin America. But there were differences even here. In fact, since the days of the Marsahll Plan in the 1940s, a fundamentally free-market and politically conservative USA had often allied with social democratic governments in Western Europe, despite not liking their internal policies very much. The USSR, except in its very late stages when it tolerated Hungary’s semi-capitalist ‘goulash communism’, demanded Communist Party rule in theory and practice.

In general the USR’s propaganda, and the arguments of its apologists in the West, could rightly be dismissed as ‘false equivalence of opposites’. There were similarities between the superpowers, but they were trivial, whereas there were differences, and they were fundamental.

So now let us turn to the new bout of alleged ‘Whataboutery’. I am myself struck by the profound similarities between Russian intervention in Syria, and Russia’s use of airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Aleppo, and Western intervention in Iraq and the sue of western airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Mosul.

I pointed this out a couple of years ago, in conversation with Christina Lamb, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. Ms Lamb scoffed, but I have never bene able to see why she did. The main difference between the two events is not material. In both cases the Islamists were using the population as hostages in dense built-up areas; in both cases the major outside powers eventually sued heavyweight airpower to crush them, with substantial civilian casualties. Nobody disputes that these attacks happened, or that innocent people died in them. But, as I’ve pointed out here, the quantity and tone of the reports on Aleppo have been quite different from those of the reports on Mosul.

But in Russia’s case, media, ‘NGOs’ and diplomats accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, etc (I have seen zero proof of this deliberate targeting, for which you would need access to the orders given to the pilots, it seems to me) . No such charges (quite rightly) were made against US British or other coalition air forces.

This isn’t false equivalence of opposites. This is false opposition of equivalents.

I mention this by way of introduction to three points I wish to make about today. The first is the story of Abdel Hakim Belhaj (or Belhadj, if you prefer, I don’t mind). Britain now admits helping in an operation in which this man was kidnapped by the CIA , along with his wife, held in a secret prison before being flown in chains to Libya, where the Gaddafi state was free to torture him at will in its disgusting dungeons.

The Guardian reported that our Prime Minister, Theresa May ‘admitted the UK should have done more to reduce the risk that the couple could be mistreated and had wrongly missed opportunities to help them once they were held in the prisons of the then Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

‘The Prime Minister acknowledged that Britain should have realised sooner that its international allies were involved in unacceptable practices, implying criticism of Libya for torturing suspects as well as the CIA's practice of rendition.’

This is so naïve it makes Pollyanna look like Machiavelli, and would be rather sweet if it didn’t involve people being chained up, starved, hooded, wrapped in duct tape, kidnapped by operatives of the Land of the Free and crammed into secret jails, and then loaded on to unmarked aircraft for a trip to one of the world’s worst tyrannies.

There’s a little side-bar to it, as well, which I find intensely moving. I don’t have much time for John McCain in general, though (like any sentient being) I have always felt that he conducted himself with extreme courage and dignity during his nightmare captivity in North Vietnam.

Now Senator McCain is very ill and close to death. The Guardian notes : ‘This is a very live issue indeed. In Washington, Gina Haspel is currently having her confirmation hearings as Donald Trump's new CIA director. From 2002, Ms Haspel ran the secret CIA centre in Thailand where inmates were tortured and where Ms Boudchar [Belhaj’s wife, pregnant at the itme of her state-sponsored kidnap] was mistreated. Mr Trump supports torture. He wants to bring back waterboarding. John McCain, the only US senator to have actually been tortured, is fighting Ms Haspel's nomination on that basis.’

A White House aide has sneeringly remarked that Senator McCain is ‘dying anyway’ . And it looks as if PresidentTrump won’t be welcome at Senator McCain’s funeral

So this is the civilised West at work, and with that a background, a certain Andrew Parker, Director-General of the British Security Service( known to many as MI5) has made a pious speech in Berlin.

Let ,me get something straight here. Aided by the TV series ‘Spooks’, the BSS has got itself a glamorous toughie reputation, and many people refer to it as a spy service. It is not. It has no espionage duties.

In fact the only accurate generic name for such an organisation, especially given the huge budgets, status and immunity form scrutiny which it enjoys these days, is that it is a form of Secret Police agency . True, it so far lacks powers of arrest. But, following the granting of such powers to civil servants (a major breach of an ancient rule) in the ‘National Crime Agency’, it cannot be long before this line is crossed.

As usual when the principles of English liberty are being raped or tossed lightly aside, few realise the significance of the granting of powers of arrest to civil servants. Civil servants are under the direct authority of government, and of ministers.

Police officers are not and have never been civil servants. They are sworn constables, whose duty is to *the law*, which they have sworn an oath to uphold without fear or favour, and not to the state itself. This position gives them the freedom, and indeed the duty, to refuse an unlawful order from a technical superior. Their local nature also helps them to resist central government pressure ( though they are nothing like as local as they should be, or as they were before the Jenkins-imposed mergers of 1967) - though the Ministry of Defence Police, the British Nuclear Police and the British Transport Police are national bodies perhaps more subject to Whitehall than they should be.

My own nightmare is the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 (read it some time), an emergency powers law so extensive that the government of the day can, if it wishes, turn this country into a sort of dictatorship in a matter of hours. So forgive me if I am not a great enthusiast for MI5. And forgive me if I am sceptical about its frequent, uncheckable claims to have thwarted terror plots. If I had a budget that big, was treated with similar reverence as that accorded to MI5, and was that well-screened from scrutiny, I too might be inclined to make boasts about how good I was at my job. Who could gainsay me? But now Mr Parker has gone to Berlin to make a well-trailed speech (front page of the semi-official newspaper ‘The Times’ and all over the BBC this morning), warning Russia that its behaviour, notably over the Skripals, might make it even more of a pariah.

Well, no doubt, but I am tempted to say ‘What about the Belhaj case (and what about the Trump administration’s view of torture and its chosen candidate to head the CIA?). It doesn’t seem to me that a muted apology in the Commons and a cheque for Mr Belhaj’s wronged wife really suggest that we have cleaned out the stables. Does that not make Britain and the USA pariahs too, and if not, why not?

And then let us note the arrival in London of Mr Recep Tayip Erdogan, President of Turkey, whose sinister nature has many times been discussed in this blog, and whose rapidly darkening country I have twice visited to document this. Mr Erdogan has in recent months turned what was a fairly free and law-governed country into a despotism. The prisons are full of journalists. The courts are lawless instruments of state power. Independent newspapers and broadcasters have been terrified into submission. Mr Erdogan is gathering all the power in Turkey into his person, and creating an executive presidency at least as menacing to a free society as Vladimir Putin’s.

His foreign policy is also highly dangerous, and is causing grave friction in Syria. Oh, and Turkey still occupies North Cyprus, which it invaded in July 1974 in an action which is an extraordinarily close diplomatic and political parallel to Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Yet Mr Erdogan is not called a pariah, and is to be welcomed at Downing Street and given tea with the Queen (as well as offered excellent deals on military equipment), photo opportunities and developments which will help him , in a rapidly approaching election, to consolidate his despotic power.

So, Mr Parker, What About That? What about Mr Belhaj? And What About Mr Erdogan? Is your wrath at Russia genuine? If it is, why do you not feel it for those who took part in the sordid kidnapping and rendition of Mr Belhaj, and who defend or excuse torture as an instrument of the state? And why do you not make speeches in Berlin (or come to that in Birmingham or Basildon), attacking Turkey?

22 November 2015 8:20 AM

So far there is little sign of serious thought about the Paris atrocities. We are to have more spooks, though spooks failed to see it coming, and failed to see most of the other outrages coming, and the new ones will be no more clairvoyant than the old ones.

France and Belgium are reaching for emergency laws, surveillance, pre-trial detention, more humiliation of innocent travellers and all the other rubbish that has never worked in the past and won’t work again.

David Cameron (in a nifty bit of news management) takes the opportunity to announce that he will henceforth be spared from flying like a normal human being, in an ego-stroking Blaircraft paid for by you and me. Austerity must have been having a day off.

Actually, if grand personages like him had to shuffle through the security screens, belts off, shoes off, shampoo humourlessly confiscated, like the rest of us, these daft and illogical rules would have been reviewed long ago.

British police officers dress up like Starship Troopers, something they’ve obviously been itching to do for ages and now have an excuse to do, the masked women involved looking oddly like Muslim women in niquabs.

It’s not the police’s job to do this. If things are so bad that we need armed people on the streets, then we have an Army and should deploy it. If not, then spare us these theatricals, which must delight the leaders of ISIS, who long for us to panic and wreck our own societies in fear of them.

Next comes the growing demand for us to bomb Syria. Well, if you want to. Only a couple of weeks ago all the establishment experts were saying that the Russian Airbus massacre was obviously the result of Vladimir Putin’s bombing of Syria.

Now the same experts say it’s ridiculous to suggest that our planned bombing of Syria might bring murder to the streets of London or to a British aircraft.

Perhaps it’s relevant to this that Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter who survived the Bataclan massacre in Paris, said he heard one fanatic in the theatre say to his victims, ‘It's the fault of Hollande, it's the fault of your President, he should not have intervened in Syria.’

There may be (I personally doubt it) a good case for what’s left of the RAF to drop what’s left of our bombs on Syria. It may be so good that it justifies risking a retaliation in our capital, and that we should brace ourselves for such a war.

But I think those who support such bombing should accept that there might be such a connection, and explain to the British people why it is worth it.

I am wholly confused by the Cameron government’s position on Syria. It presents its desire to bomb that country as a rerun of the Parliamentary vote it lost in 2013.

But in 2013, Mr Cameron wanted (wrongly, as it turned out) to bomb President Assad’s forces and installations, to help the Islamist sectarian fanatics who are fighting to overthrow the secular Assad state.

This is more or less the exact opposite of what he seems to want now. Far from being a rerun, it is one of the most embarrassing diplomatic U-turns in modern British history.

Or is it? Does Mr Cameron in fact intend, somehow, to return to his original purpose, and to use the RAF to aid the anti-Assad rebels – who are the sort of people he would arrest if they turned up here?

If ISIS was our real target, then this would be absurd. But is ISIS our real target? If so, we would abandon all scruple, and side with the Syrian Kurds, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Russia and Assad to defeat it. For they are by far its most effective opponents.

After all, when we fought the Hitler menace, we allied with another monster, Stalin, to do so.

Mr Cameron also called ISIS ‘the head of the snake’, and the origin of all these horrors. But again, is this true? Or is ISIS in fact an outgrowth of the burgeoning, richly-funded spread of extreme, puritanical, intolerant, violent Islamism, whose head is not in Raqqa but rather further south?

I hope that if Mr Cameron brings a plan for war to Parliament, there will be enough informed and wise men and women there to question him thoroughly on these points, and vote against him if they are not convinced.

Trickery and propaganda do not invariably arrive in the same shape. Just because we all now know that Anthony Blair defrauded us into a dangerous war with WMD, we shouldn’t be too sure that we won’t be just as easily fooled by his equally smooth and persuasive heir.

The Terror Link Nobody Wants to Talk About

What do modern terrorists have in common? Yes, they are fanatical Islamists, usually (but not always) from ethnic minorities.

But there’s something else very interesting. They are invariably on mind-altering drugs, usually cannabis. The Bombay killers took cocaine and steroids. Anders Breivik took steroids. At least one of the Boston bombers , the Tsarnaev brothers smoked cannabis (one heard voices in his head, one of them was without doubt a dope dealer) , Lee Rigby’s killers. Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, smoked (a lot of ) cannabis. Omar El-Hussein, the Copenhagen killer, had twice been arrested for cannabis offences. Seifeddine Rezgui, the Tunisian beach killer, was a cannabis user. Ayoub el-Khazzani, who tried to kill passengers on the Amsterdam Paris train, is a convicted dope user. The Charlie Hebdo killers, the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, were known cannabis users. The killers of two Canadian soldiers, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, were cannabis users.

And now we know that the same is true of the November 13 killers, Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam,were heavy users of marijuana. Abdelhamid Abaaoud had likewise ‘drifted into a life of thievery and drugs’. Omar Ismail Mostefai was on police records for buying illegal drugs. As for Hasna Aitboulahcen, who was blown to pieces in the St Denis siege, she ‘hung around with drug dealers’.

Don’t try to avoid the significance of this information by accusing me of saying things I don’t. The point here is that drug abuse appears to be a common factor. So why completely ignore it? If the police of North America and Western Europe stopped turning a blind eye to it, they might be a lot more use in the struggle to defend us all from terror.

An exquisite skyline swamped by concrete

Approval has now been given for the building of a vast new concrete slab in the heart of London, 22 Bishopsgate. You may like this sort of thing or not. But once it is built it will be hard to tell London’s skyline from that of Chicago. This doesn’t seem to me to be a gain. In a generation, Christopher Wren’s lovely forest of spires and domes, which belonged to Britain and the world, has been shouldered aside by temples of greed. I am astonished that this has happened with so little protest.

What's so funny about this unpleasant story?

Alan Bennett has for many years dug into the darker side of suburban Britain, giving a faintly tragic, even sordid, tinge to what most of us think is normal and reasonably happy. How strange, then, that the new film by and about him ‘The Lady in the Van’ , makes an oddly cheerful comedy about what looks to me like a rather unpleasant story. Did none of his rich, left-wing north London neighbours shun him for allowing a smelly, bad-tempered nuisance to park in his front garden for years? If so, they aren’t in the film.

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27 October 2011 1:23 PM

I am publishing this as a free-standing post because I feel it must be resolved properly, and want to be certain that the person involved is aware of the risks he runs.

Some days ago, in a response to my column of last Sunday (‘This is no SuperCam’), a Mr ‘Harold Stone’ posted a comment. I should say here that some of his comment was edited for legal reasons but - according to the rules which operate here - his direct personal criticisms of me were not edited. All may say what you like about me, provided it is true, or just hostile and abusive. Untruths, however, are not acceptable. The editing process also led to a delay in his words being published. But they were published. This is what he said: He first quoted what I had said :‘It occurs to me - though of course it isn’t true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the ‘British Patriotic Party’, and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers.’

He then wrote: ‘And it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys about the effectiveness of the party system, or oppose repatriation on “moral grounds” because the other deception they peddle, about the irrelevance of racial differences, allows them to insist that an Englishman can come from Tunbridge or Timbuktu. You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services (think Ian Fleming and a score of others less well-known). Speaking as a racialist myself, that is to say one genuinely led by the facts, by observation, by reason and the lessons of history rather than pretending to be, I’d say it’s how all security services operate to discredit truth-tellers. Trotsky ordered the cadres to ignore rational argument and to make truth-telling distasteful to people. Equalitarian dogma (disguised as Christianity?) could thereby pass itself off as ‘authentic’ conservatism which, because of its ideologically driven repudiation of biology, would fail to conserve a damned thing. Again I must ask if you know what a nation actually is Mr Hitchens, you who boast about your grasp of history, and wonder what on earth gives you the right to sneer at Cameron when you display not a shred of integrity yourself on this subject, since it’s plain you know the truth deep down?’

Mr Stone is welcome to his opinions, much as I dislike them. But he appears to suggest that I am an employee or servant of the Security Service, engaging in systematic dishonesty on their behalf. He uses these pretty direct words: ‘You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services’ and ‘it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys’.

I must ask him either to substantiate this allegation with facts, or to withdraw it and offer an unreserved apology. If he does neither then, under the usual rules, he will no longer be welcome here. I think a week should be enough. In case he has not so far seen this warning (first posted yesterday on the relevant thread) I will date that week from the publication of this posting. I will listen to any reasonable request for more time but given his confident tone, I imagine he has the evidence at his fingertips and should rapidly be able to back up his claims. Or perhaps not.

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11 May 2006 11:15 AM

The reason why MI5 and the rest of the 'Security' apparatus failed on July 7 is that there is no such thing as total security. More laws, more spooks, more surveillance will leave us poorer and less free, but they probably won't stop a single bomb.

Terrorism is by its nature a surprise attack on a huge, unsuspecting soft target. And in a huge, civilised society a few crude bombs can do terrible damage. It is simply foolish to imagine that we can be totally protected against this - though proper control of our borders and a police force that patrolled on foot would make a surprising difference.

So reject any calls for yet more money to be lavished on MI5 or SOCA or any other of these rather creepy organisations which already look altogether too much like an embryo secret police. Hard graft, good knowledge of a neighbourhood and its people, and mother wit are far more likely to uncover murder plots than expensive apparatus or graduate trainees. If MI5 want more money, let them give us real proof that they are any use at all. I have yet to see any.